Scaffolding an AI-enabled codebase from the ground up to support agentic engineering. Scaffolding an AI-enabled codebase from the ground up to support agentic engineering.

At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can know about how fast it’s moving, and vice versa. Recently, this rule got a rare upgrade. The new uncertainty principle relates to fractals, shapes that remain equally complex no matter how much you… Source At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the un...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday August 11, 2026 in Portland Oregon. The freezer isn’t working. It’s super irritating. We’ve tried a whole bunch of stuff (I got the multimeter out!) and we’re getting to the point where it’s time to call someone out to take a look at it. I’m not ready to do the switchover quite yet, but a much better archive and home for this newsletter (still powered by Buttondown !) will be launching at thingsthatcaughtmyattention.com . Let me know what you thin...

Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we are automatically generating more and more explanatory artifacts instead of writing them, navigating codebases as a human is becoming an exercise in futility. I’m not the only one: We are already constantly drowning in tech jargon, much of which comes to us presented through brea...

Thanks to a lot of hard work by Liz Neeley , I had a chance to run the project closure workshop online yesterday. I think it went pretty well, and I really enjoyed meeting all the participants, but as the saying goes, no lesson survives first contact with learners. In particular, there’s a lot of duplication, and I think I need to reorganize the material in a 2x2 scheme: Sudden Gradual Project Continues Emergency planning Success planning Project Ends Abrupt closure Deliberate closu...

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was curious if this really makes a difference, so conducted a few experiments . more… My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. ...

I have decided to run for the inaugural/2026 Python packaging council (PPC). I will say I have the support of my employer (Microsoft) to do this, but they didn't ask me to and my usual thing that I would quit before I let any employer pressure me into doing anything I didn't agree with still stands. I will admit that writing this was a little hard for me since it's for the entire PSF membership (compared to the SC which is only Python core developers), and so I had to assume someone had no ide...

tl;dr: To play the game in the browser, click here . (Doesn’t work on mobile, sound warning, use escape to access options and see controls.) What started as a cute little project to learn one or two things about game development eventually turned into a (pretty darn close to perfect) replica of an existing game. You can go and give it a try, or read on to hear my thoughts on Godot, Claude, and gamedev. TICKET TKR and WATCH DOG. Party House is a great game. If you’re not ...

This is the fifth client I work with this week who’s auto-replied to an email I sent with this: I am currently on leave returning on the 17th of August. I don’t think I’ve ever had two clients from disparate companies share leave, at least outside popular holidays like Lunar New Year or Xmas. And now five people have? MAMBO NO. 5!? What’s going on? Is there some awesome event going on now to which I wasn’t invited? Do they know something we don’t? If a massive new ...

Rebirth Author: RR Haywood Genre: Sci-fi Released: 2026 Rating: ★★★★☆ How do you prevent a hero from saving the world?In the first trilogy, three heroes were extracted from their timelines to save the world. Now we need them again. Meet Ben Ryder, Safa Patel, and Harry Madden. Just not as you knew them. Three selfish b*stards who hate each other almost as much as they hate everyone else. REBIRTH takes us back into the Extracted world for another wild adventure chock-full o...

Fiction Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino . Beautiful prose and imagination. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño . Beautiful and surreal prose, but completely unpretentious. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm . I had already read most of these but they are very, very good, and it was a pleasure to read them again. ⭐️ Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman . Usually when I hear “it’s a 900 page Russian epic about three generations of a family living throu...

Introduction In the Livelymerge project, Dan Ingalls, Peter van Hardenberg, and I (Alex Warth) are building a Lively Kernel-like system whose heap is an Automerge document. (See my previous lab note for the details of our object model.) The whole point of this arrangement is that every object is persistent and shared: if you and I are looking at the same document, we’re looking at the same objects, and they’ll still be there two weeks from now. It didn’t take much multi-user testin...

Enjoying Idaho while ignoring Illinois Today is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice. As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and about 160 of my colleagues, staff and faculty, untenured and tenured, lost our positions at Illinois Tech after they declared "financial exigency" which allows them to eliminate tenured positions. I'll use this post to tell my story, but keep in mind there are 160 other ones. The president announced that he would be asking the board to d...

Tigris has a pretty advanced replication scheme for writes. What happens when you actually need to delete things? Turns out deleting things is hard in distributed systems. Especially when you have a geo-replicated active-active database like Tigris does. We can (and do) use tombstones to mark where data once was, but how do you let people undo an accidental delete? Tigris wants to turn storage inside out , so our implementation of soft d...

Yesterday I was emailing with the always lovely Robin Harford, who has a wonderful website over at eatweeds.co.uk . We were discussing the sad state of the web, and wondering what can be done to prevent Google and the others from abusing our content. And within that discussion, he mentioned his hate for the word “ content ”. He’s not the only one who feel that way; I’ve seen quite a few people mentioning this issue of the use of the word “content” to describe the product of someon...

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Open Lunar Foundation  is continuing as a sponsor of my  Moon Monday  blog+newsletter for the sixth year!  🌕 Open Lunar is a US-based non-profit organization with a global team that develops bottom-up tools of lunar governance to enable and promote cooperative, peaceful, and sustainable exploration of our Moon by all countries. Disclaimer for transparency:  I aid Open Lunar’s work with technical communications , and have newly joined ...

AI-assisted programming is fast evolving and there is a tension between ‘we no longer need to understand the code’ and ‘what is my purpose as a programmer’. I recorded a short video on this topic with how I think the tension can result in conflicts. AI-assisted programming is fast evolving and there is a tension between ‘we no longer need to understand the code’ and ‘what is my purpose as a programmer’. I recorded a short video on this topic with how I think the tension can ...

Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading. Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading.

In the month of April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, emissions, tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanics’, combined with a slight delay on parts I ordered. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 hours I was riding back in a tow truck. In the month of April my ...

Ever since I published “Blogs, websites, and identity”, I have been thinking about and discussing some of the questions I raised in the blog post: why do we take photos, what does it mean to write on the web. The essay feels like a starting point : a framing from which to work, a point of reference, a repository of questions. In the essay, I wrote: But I can’t shake my question: what does it mean to write on the web? I am still thinking about this question. I am no closer to having a writ...

A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… A few people I know have a style guide for their blog/website, so here are my thoughts on a Style Guide for this site. Read more on the site… Read more on the site…

Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars building out datacenters when everyone will just be able to run AI models on their laptops or phones? I think this idea is doomed. No matter how strong open-weight models get, most inference will always happen in AI datacenters. Local models are too weak to be widely used Local models are never going to be as powerful . I think this point should be obvious: all of t...

I have a lot of open source projects (of varying sizes and shapes). At time of writing, I’m currently maintaining ×78 npm packages. Of those, 22 are super lightweight zero-dependency custom elements a.k.a. 🚾 Web Components ( love the future compatibility I get with very little maintenance required ). In addition, I also have a few active websites and starter/template projects that are open source too. I usually rotate maintenance on these and needed a way to quickly scan my little ...